Vulnerabilities Found in Philips IntelliVue Patient and Avalon Fetal Monitors

An advisory was issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) regarding the vulnerabilities found in some Philips IntelliVue Patient and Avalon Fetal monitors. Philips has identified three vulnerabilities in its products and informed ICS-CERT.

If an attacker exploits the vulnerabilities, it would be possible to read/write memory and implement a denial of service by restarting the system. The exploitation could lead to a slow down in patient diagnosis and treatment. The following products have been identified to have vulnerabilities:

CWE-200 – Information Exposure Vulnerability
An unauthenticated attacker could exploit and read the memory of a device on the same subnet.

CWE-0287 – Improper Authentication Vulnerability
If an unauthenticated person gains LAN access, it would be possible to access the memory (write-what-where) of a chosen device on the same subnet.

CWE-121 – Stack-Based Buffer Overload Vulnerability
An attacker that exploits this vulnerability will expose an echo service and trigger a stack overflow.

What Philips Did to Mitigate the Problem:
Philips revealed the device vulnerabilities under its co-ordinated vulnerability disclosure policy. Philips issued an advisory to let users know about the vulnerabilities in affected products to allow them to take action to prevent the flaws from being exploited. Phillips explained there is no way to exploit the vulnerabilities remotely. A malicious actor needs to first access the LAN to the devices are connected. In addition, the attacker must have a high level of technical ability to exploit the vulnerabilities.

So far, there have been no reports received to indicate the vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild. Philips is developing a patch to fix all three vulnerabilities on IntelliVue software Revisions J-M and Avalon software Revisions G.0 and J.3 in 2018. For devices running on non-supported versions, Philips is providing an update-path to help users upgrade their device to a supported version. Users of affected devices should contact their Philips sales representative for more information.

For the time being, users can take the following steps to minimize the possibility of exploitation of the vulnerabilities:

For IntelliVue Monitors – Carry out the guidelines for use in the Security for Clinical Networks Guide and upgrade to Revision K.2 or newer software.

For Avalon Fetal Monitors Release G.0 and Release J.3 – Carry out the Data Privacy and Network Security specifications available in the installation and service manual.